Re:TheAshLad - Sandbooks

phenomena may serve as empirical evidence. The early focus of
conceptualist Net.art on the aesthetics and politics of. code. in turn the
impact of Net.art aesthetics on experimental literature. poetry in the
Internet. the close discooursive affinity of Net.art to political activism
in the. Internet. the close aesthetic affinity of Net.art to a the languages
and codes of an. older technically oriented ''hacker'' culture (of Chaos
Computer Club. and others). a convergence of the three cultures
mentioned above Net.art net activism. and hacker culture. (a) FreeOpen
Source Software andor (b) open network protocols as key. discursive
political and aesthetical issues in all these camps. finally the impact of
hacker aesthetics Net.art aesthetics code. aesthetics and network
protocol aesthetics on contemporary writing in the. Internet. (See the
work of mez Alan Sondheim Talan Memmott Ted Warnell. and
others.). The question is how ''Codeworks'' (Alan Sondheim) fit
notions of text that. were crafted without digital code most importantly
machineexecutable. digital code in mind and vice versa. Is it a
coincidence that in their. poetical appropriation of lowlevel Internet
codes codeworks ended up. aesthetically resembling concrete poetry
And apart from aesthetic. resemblances how do computer programs
relate to literature Is that what is. currently being discussed as
''Software Art'' a literary genre. Code. Since computers the Internet
and all digital technologies are based on. zeros and ones they are based
on code. Zeros and ones are an alphabet which. can be translated forth
and back between other alphabets without information. loss. It does in
my point of view make no sense to limit the definition of. the alphabet
in general to that of the Roman alphabet in particular when we. can the
same textual information in this very alphabet as Morse code flag. signs
or transliterated into zeros and ones. The Internet and computers run. on
alphabetic code whereas for examples images and sound can only be.
digitally stored when translating them into code which unlike the.
translation of conventional text into digital bits is a lossy that is. not
fully reversible and symmetric translation. Sounds and images are not.
code by themselves but have to be turned into code in order to be
computed. where as any written text already is code. Literature
therefore is a. privileged symbolic form in digital information systems.
It is possible to. automatically search a collection of text files for all
occurences of the. word ''bird'' but doing the same with birds in a
collection of image files. or bird songs in a collection of audio files is
incomparably tricky and. errorprone relying on either artificial
intelligence algorithms or manual. indexing both of which are methods
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